RP: A Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

[peter_crawford]

Date: 10 January
Characters: Peter Crawford, Adison Quinn, Jen (NPC)
Location: JPS hospital
Status: Private
Summary: Peter's got his hands full
Completion: Complete

Comments

[adison_quinn]

Adison bites her lip, concentrating hard. It's a tough draw; the vein is easily visible, but the patient is elderly so there's nothing anchoring it in place. If she can make this draw on the first try, maybe she can start proving herself to the older phlebs.

She's done this enough times that she can feel the needle slide home: inside the lumen of the vein, not transfixed. She pops the first tube on and grins as it begins to fill.

Her pager goes off. She manages not to jump this time and sighs in relief; last time she'd been paged during a draw, she'd jostled the needle in the patient's arm and... well, no one had been happy with her that day.

She finishes the draw as quickly as she can and pulls the pager out of her pocket on her way out of the room. There are eight STAT INRs to draw on the ortho floor? What the hell is going on

[peter_crawford]

"Just one tube," Peter reassured the young man with the pins. "Just double-checking your blood-thinners. We can't adjust your meds if there might be an error with the lab, so just to be on the safe side..." He pressed his gloved thumb to the spot where the needle came out, holding it for a good minute to make sure that it stopped bleeding. "You let me know if this starts bleeding again, okay

[adison_quinn]

"Despite the fact it's my department, I'd rather a lab screwup than a med disaster," Adison said, accepting the tubes and tucking them into an empty rack marked STAT/ASAP. "Thanks. Which two...?" She compared the names on the tubes to her reqs, tore away the two the nurse already drew, and accepted the additional order from him. "Type and cross, got it. I'll take care of them.

"And I'm Adison. I'll probably forget your name," she added, walking backward toward the first patients' room. "Easier for a couple hundred older employees to remember me than it is for me to remember a couple hundred of you." She smiled, gave a little half-wave half-salute, and turned to knock on the door. "Hi there, I'm from the lab, I'm here to take some blood. How are you today?"

[peter_crawford]

Peter chuckled. How right it was. It'd taken him weeks to learn just the nurses on ortho. He turned to the stack of charts and picked up the first one, flipping to the orders section to write the telephone order from his notes. It didn't take long to document the orders, note them on the kardex, then find Jen and retrieve his keys

[adison_quinn]

"I promise I'll leave you a little bit," Adison said, busying her hands with her work to keep herself from glancing up at the nurse. Peter, he'd said. Was he flirting? Or just being fun for the patient's sake? Probably the latter. For all the time she spent flirting, she knew she was terrible at knowing when others were

[peter_crawford]

"I s'pose I'll survive," Mrs. Ames said, giving Adison's hand a pat. Peter noticed her looking at the gauze with a worried expression, then her eyes meet his.

"Just a double check," he assured her. "Sometimes your blood thinners work a little too well. According to what the lab shows this time, I'll likely be giving you an injection in a while to stop you up a little."

"Those pain pills are doing a bang-up job of that already," she grumbled, but her eyes twinkled with good humour.

Peter laughed. "Then I'll bring you an injection and some dynamite." He jotted his initials and the time on the IV bag, then looked down at Adison.

"Slowing at all? I've got some stretch tape..." He dug it out of his pocket and offered it over. "A little extra pressure. I'll keep an eye on it for a while."

[adison_quinn]

"It's... slowing a little, yeah," Adison said, checking once more. "Thanks

[peter_crawford]

The bloodbank had called for a pickup, and Peter had sent Jen to pick up the unit and a coke. He'd need both before the shift was over, he had the feeling, and he gathered supplies to head into another room. A routine knee replacement with bloody urine. Not good. He'd got the order for a catheter to measure and monitor, and although the patient wasn't pleased about it, he was cooperative and it took only a few minutes to do.

Peter hung the drainage bag on the edge of the bed and watched the cranberry colored urine drain, then helped the patient settle and washed his hands. "I'm right in the hall if you need me."

He'd just reached the station when Adison came around the corner. "I'm not sure I like that look," he said, looking at the sheaf of results she held. "And I'm pretty sure you're not going to tell me it's a bad day in the lab."

[adison_quinn]

Adison gave him an "I can't help it" look along with the results. "It isn't a good day in the lab, but you still won't like these results. Your lowest is a 5; most are eights and nines." She scowled. "My training's limited but I can't imagine how this would happen in such a variety of patients, all at once."

[peter_crawford]

Glancing through the printouts was like reading a bad novel, it just kept getting worse. "I can't either. You get one patient, once in a while. Someone's taking something they didn't tell you about. Some herbal thing, or drinking, or... God." Peter dragged a hand through his hair, frustrated, then took a breath

[adison_quinn]

"Yeah, I am. They might not send me, though; we vampires are pretty interchangeable."

Adison nodded politely to the second nurse and turned to go back upstairs. A few steps away she turned on her heel, walking backwards.

"Good luck," she called, giving one of her half-salute waves.